Russia will require migrants to buy mobile phones so authorities can track their whereabouts, Deputy Interior Minister Igor Zubov said, according to the Russian business news outlet RBC:
Everyone’s interested in what the future holds, in where we’re headed. Every migrant who registers here on arrival — especially for work or for a long stay — will be required to buy a phone. That phone will hold their electronic profile. And we will know the location of every migrant.
As a result, Zubov said, migrants will be unable to move from one city to another “uncontrollably.”
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Since September 2025, Moscow has been running a pilot program that requires every foreign national who has come to work in the city to install an app called “Amina,” which shows their location. If it receives no geolocation data for three straight days, the person is dropped from the registration rolls.
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Uh, what’s the difference to a regular phone? Can’t they just triangulate positions as they please? They’re in a dictatorship, it’s not like they need a warrant.
GPS, GLONASS and WiFi based locating is much more precise then just using phone base triangulation. It is also really hard, when you only have a single antenna in some far of village in Siberia or so.